It is entirely correct to think of the Aztec legend Quetzalcoatl in three contexts — as historical personality, as divinity and as literary subject. In the first incarnation he is a 10th century priest-king; in the second a deity associated with progress and humanity; in the third an object of intense interest to both ancient […]
Continue ReadingTimothy Dwight, the fervently reactionary and comically pompous head of Yale University, was a strong Federalist supporter who predicted that the accession of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency would lead to “a frenzied dance of Jacobinism.” Jacobinism — the doctrine of the ultra-radical and anticlerical wing of the French revolutionary movement — was as much […]
Continue ReadingWhile most of the leaders of Mexico’s War of Independence were Mexican-born creoles, an exception was Francisco Javier Mina, whose name today appears on street signs and monuments throughout Mexico. Like Burke, Fox and Paine, Mina was a citizen of the mother country who deeply felt the pain inflicted on its colonists. Appropriately for a […]
Continue ReadingIn Norman Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, the term “chutzpah” is defined as “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts’; presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word … can do justice to.” As an example of chutzpah, Rosten cites “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy […]
Continue ReadingFew people have ever less fitted the conventional image of a revolutionary than Venustiano Carranza. He was a country squire rather than an intellectual, he had been part of a ruling establishment and he took up revolution at an age when most men are contemplating retirement. Yet history placed him among the leading figures in […]
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José Guadalupe Posada is in the great tradition of cartoonists who double as political and social commentators. That tradition includes Honoré Daumier, whose merciless portraits of bourgeois society caused him to be acclaimed as the greatest social satirist of his day, Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, and such living political cartoonists as Herbert […]
Continue Reading(This is the third of a three-part series about Mexico’s tragic Cristero Rebellion, when forces of secular and religious fanaticism were locked in a no-quarter battle for the country’s soul.) Few movements have ever suffered more from a crisis in leadership than that of the Cristeros. René Capistrán Garza, the fiery but inexperienced young zealot […]
Continue Reading(This is the second of a three-part series about Mexico’s tragic Cristero Rebellion, when forces of secular and religious fanaticism were locked in a no-quarter battle for the country’s soul.) The Cristero Rebellion officially began with a manifesto issued by René Capistrán Garza on New Year’s Day 1927. Titled A la Nación (“To the Nation”), it declared […]
Continue ReadingSince it is the near unanimous verdict of authorities on American history that Abraham Lincoln was our greatest president, it has become a facile formula among historians of other nations to describe their greatest leaders as “Lincolns.” Was Clemenceau a French Lincoln? Was Churchill a British Lincoln? In a way, yes. Both leaders presided over […]
Continue Reading(This is the first of a three-part series about Mexico’s tragic Cristero Rebellion, when forces of secular and religious fanaticism were locked in a no-quarter battle for the country’s soul.) 1: Toward the abyss The 1920s -1930s struggle between Church and State in Mexico ultimately goes back to five articles of the 1917 Constitution. Article 3 […]
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